Fragments of My Teacher on Shavuot

An early work by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi is back in print.

One of my fondest memories of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the spiritually adventurous rabbinic pioneer of Jewish spirituality, is from twelve years ago tonight: Shavuot, the Jewish holiday of redemption. As it turned out, this was the last time I would see Reb Zalman, and a few weeks before he would pass away on July 3, 2014, at the age of 89.

For several years, Reb Zalman’s Shavuot retreat at the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center was a special occasion, especially for his most devoted followers in the Jewish Renewal movement. The truth is, some of the followers were a little too devoted, at least for my taste. At that time, the small, mystically-infused group seemed to be pulled in two opposing directions: egalitarianism on the other hand, charismatic leadership on the other. We were all filled with the Divine; we were politically liberal (some radical); we were feminist and queer-affirming; we embraced cross-pollination of spiritual traditions and in radical ecumenism. And yet, there was the rebbe on his special chair, devotees hanging on his every word and gesture.

Reb Zalman was aware of this contradiction. In his scholarly work, he studied how Hasidic rabbis acted as spiritual counselors and community leaders. In his spiritual leadership, he seemed reluctantly to embrace his role as guru, if only as upaya – skillful means – to guide his followers to greater awareness and love. As he did.

That night, Reb Zalman appeared weakened. Throughout his eighties, he had remained lively, energetic, intellectually curious, and engaged. He never lost his affinity for the latest technology or the latest technological metaphor for spirituality — in 2006, my magazine published an essay of his, entitled “A parable on the state of the Jewish mythic world after my hard drive crashed.” But that night, he was tired.

For my contribution to the Tikkun Leil Shavuot, the all-night learning/ singing/ trance practice done on Shavuot eve, I had decided to go for it: we would recite the forty-two-letter name of God (popularly known as the Ana B’Koach) with the vowel permutations and head movements developed by the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia. This was intrinsically heretical, since somewhere in all those permutations, we would be reciting the ‘correct’ version of an unpronounceable divine name. But I was curious to see what would happen.

To my surprise, Reb Zalman joined in the session, weak as he was. He chanted along, moving his head as Abulafia taught. And I felt something mysterious in that room, something magical — maybe just an altered state in my own mind, maybe something transpersonal; I never know with such experiences, but I love them anyway. And Reb Zalman seemed to as well. We made eye contact at the end. I felt like I had, perhaps, given him a gift, or at least arranged the conditions for him to give himself one. He was weakened but he could still enter the orchard.

* * *

My first meeting with Reb Zalman was more fraught. It was 1994, and I was a first-year student at Yale Law School. I was also Orthodox-passing (I wore a kippa and kept kosher in a strict way) and closeted in multiple ways: the obvious one, but also pretending to be a normal, neurotypical law student, trying to fit in with the Jewish and law school communities while secretly having little to do with them. I was just back from a year in Israel, mystically curious, but still tightly wound and repressed. I was in no way prepared for the intense, intimate, and interpersonal experience Reb Zalman had planned for us.

It was a small group, maybe a dozen people, in a small room near the Hillel building. At one point, we were instructed to partner up, gaze into one another’s eyes, and recite the Shema prayer using our partners’ names: “Listen, Jay, Yah our God is One.” I don’t think I’ve ever felt so awkward in my entire life.

I managed to stay for the entire experience, but practically ran back to my apartment as soon as it was over.

I was curious about this renegade hippie rabbi because a year earlier, I picked up his first book, Fragments of a Future Scroll, at Sefer v’Sefel, the used bookstore that was one of my favorite places in Jerusalem. The book has “25—” written on the first page; the price, 25 shekels. I still have it, in the original 1975 edition with a yellow cover and yellowed pages.

At the time, I didn’t understand how revolutionary the book was: how it was the first Jewish book of its kind, bringing mystical concepts together with a radically pluralistic approach to spirituality. It seemed more weird than anything else, a word that, at the time, I didn’t consider a compliment. Its subtitle was “Hassidism for an Aquarian Age.” Already in the introduction, Reb Zalman was remarking on the prevalence of Jews in new spiritual communities (they weren’t calling them ‘New Age’ yet), distinguishing between Jews practicing Hatha Yoga (“no problem”) and Bhakti Yoga (“may become a problem”), and noting the curious fact that, although “there is no denying the current interest of Jews in mysticism,” there were few specifically Jewish centers, books, or teachers for them to turn to, at least outside Orthodox contexts.

Fragments sought to fill this gap. And yet, Zalman wrote, “books and I don’t generally get along.” And so the volume insists it is only a collection of prompts: Hasidic texts, invitations to reflect on (pan-)theology, and reiterations of the principle that spiritual teachings must be embodied and practiced, not learned. “How can anyone whose knowledge comes from books be proud?” Zalman asks in the book’s conclusion.

By the time I acquired the book in the 1990s, none of this was groundbreaking. On the contrary, the anti-rational correction had already gone far in the other direction — perhaps too far, with nonsensical New Age imaginings justified by a trust in intuition over intellection. This was sometimes true even in Jewish Renewal itself, to Reb Zalman’s dismay. He’d had the benefit of immersing in the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic tradition, arguably the most intellectually-minded of the Hasidic sects. He had long ago broken what he called “the Sefer barrier” (the book barrier, which you would understand if you had broken it: the ability to open up a traditional Jewish book and learn from it in the original language). In 1975, Reb Zalman was reacting to a form of rationalistic Jewish practice that he, himself, would later help to overturn.

* * *

Now, Fragments is back, in a new edition by Ayin Press (which also published my book of short stories a few years ago) with commentaries by some of Reb Zalman’s peers (Arthur Kurzweil), disciples (Shaul Magid, Tirzah Firestone), and spiritual descendants (Jericho Vincent, Ayin co-publisher Eden Pearlstein). The new edition situates Fragments in its context and makes a convincing case for its innovation. Like a Norton edition, and like the Torah itself, Fragments is now embedded within commentary and notes, both primary and secondary source.

Until Eden told me about the project, I hadn’t known the book had gone out of print in the first place. For decades now, it’s sat on my bookshelf, occasionally to be perused, often forgotten. Once, I led a workshop at Burning Man that took its name from a remark that the book’s afterword that it was intended “to be read with a liquid mind.” I didn’t realize it had become rare. And now there’s something jarring about this new edition, at least for me. I never realized how much of my experience of Fragments was physical: the worn yellow cover, the irritating notes and underlines (it was a used copy), the dogeared pages. For me, it will always be the weird book I picked up in Jerusalem.

It’s not just me. “Fragments is weird, delightfully so,” writes Pearlstein in the introduction. It is “a prophetic mishmash of new, paradigm-shifting ideas and devotionally inspired translations of sacred manuscripts,” writes Firestone. And yet, they and the other commentators note, it had a profound impact on people who later became Jewish spiritual innovators. The book is the Velvet Underground of Jewish spirituality.

Does it hold up? Mostly yes. As Magid notes in his introduction, Fragments is an early statement of what would later become a widespread path for spiritual seekers: “Jewish renewal as revolution, not return.” The double entendre of ‘return’ is apt here. The numerical majority of newly religious Jews are ba’alei teshuvah — teshuvah means repentance but literally means return. These Jews also ‘return’ to an older, traditionalist lifestyle that is in some ways pre-modern, that rejects many contemporary cultural trappings, and that seeks to turn away from individualism and (re-)turn to a more holistic life of Jewish observance, study, and myth.

But Zalman, along with Rabbis Arthur Waskow, Michael Lerner, Michael Strassfeld, Arthur Green and other men [sic] of the 1970s and 1980s, offered a different path: the vitality of Jewish spiritual practice without the attempt to return to an imagined Jewish past. Rather, the past is renewed, placed in conversation with other traditions, with post-hippie progressive politics, and with the experiential pragmatism that still defines the spiritual but not traditionally religious.

“What is Hasidism all about?” Reb Zalman asks in the book. “It is a way, a moving way. It is a way of serving God… There is not a single one of us who could not give advice to the whole world as to what it ought to do. The only problem is how?”

And so, while Fragments introduces dozens of abstruse concepts of Kabbalah, Hasidism, and Jewish lore, it insists that these are fundamentally tools, not doctrines. The book (or anti-book, as Magid terms it) is more like a cookbook than an encyclopedia. This emphasis accords with some venerable Jewish values (na’aseh v’nishma; we will do and we will understand, say the Israelites at Sinai) but also reflects the experimental and experiential nature of the ‘Aquarian Age.’ Try this, Reb Zalman seems to say (as he did to me in 1994) and see if you can open your heart.

As a project, Fragments pairs well with one of my most formative Jewish texts, Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck.” Both Rich and Schachter-Shalomi recognize that there are treasures to be found in the old ways, though Rich is more sensitive to the perils as well. Where Reb Zalman finds himself in the words of old Hasidic masters, “Diving” concludes with the protagonist carrying “a book of myths/in which/our names do not appear.”

Which is perhaps where Fragments ages less well. There are a lot of names that do not appear in these books by white Jewish men of the seventies and eighties. There are a lot of doors left unopened, even unnoticed. It would take a new generation of Jewish innovators, especially female ones, to point that out: feminist scholars like Paula Hyman, Judith Plaskow, and Susannah Heschel; spiritual leaders like Lynn Gottlieb, Rebecca Alpert, Phyllis Berman, Firestone, Marcia Prager; the creators of Lilith magazine; and many, many others.

One cannot fault Schachter-Shalomi for these omissions, and when feminists challenged him, he mostly listened and changed. Symbolically, the organization he founded, B’nai Or (sons of light) became P’nai Or (faces of light). Practically, women took leadership positions, feminine god-language became adopted by Jewish Renewal, patriarchal conceptions of nature, God, world, the body, and leadership began to be productively challenged and expanded – and sometimes junked. At the very least, there is certainly less patriarchy in Fragments than in most Jewish books from the period. And that is saying something.

* * *

I think what I love about my old version of Fragments is its intimacy. While I cherish the many times I learned from him, right up through Shavuot 2014, my favorite memory of Reb Zalman came on a day (even a year) I cannot remember. One evening, while I sitting at home in my pajamas, the then-familiar cadence of a Skype phone call beeped and blooped at me from the computer. Sure enough, it was Reb Zalman, and as soon as I clicked the green button, he launched right into questions about Sabbetai Zevi and Jacob Frank, which I strove to answer without being self-conscious. What a treat, I thought, then and now; what a joy.

The new Fragments appropriately notes Reb Zalman’s place in the history of American Judaism. It situates him, contextualizes him, and recognizes his innovations. And I’m glad that you can now access it. But I love my old yellow edition, with its quirky layout and DIY aesthetic. It reminds me of my teacher.

---

Happy Shavuot if you’re celebrating, and sincere thanks to my paying subscribers who make this work possible.